1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to display apparatuses, and particular to a display unit for a navigation system and a navigation system using the same.
2. Related Art
Recently, a navigation system has been mounted on a vehicle. It is preferable for user of the navigation system to brows Internet information (e.g., information written in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) format) by using a display unit of the vehicular navigation system. It can be realized by integrating a program of a browser, which is software to brows (read) the HTML data, into the vehicular navigation system.
In a case where text data (character string data) of the Internet information is displayed on the display unit of the vehicular navigation system, as shown in FIG. 5, it might be thought to display the text data at entire area, on which the text data can be displayed, of a display screen A of the display unit. Furthermore, when an amount of the text data is larger than a predetermined value, which is a maximum amount of the text data be displayed at one time, it might be thought to display the text data by vertically scrolling the text data.
However, the display unit for the vehicular navigation system is small compared to a display unit for a personal computer or the like. Furthermore, a passenger sat on a front passenger seat has to see the display unit from a portion having a large visual angle with respect to a normal direction of the display surface. In such a case, it might be hard to see the text data at a peripheral portion of the display screen due to its viewing angle.
Here, when a map is displayed on the display screen, the map can be easily scrolled in lateral direction or in vertical direction. Therefore, even when it is hard to see the map at a peripheral portion of the screen, the map can be easily recognized by laterally scrolling the screen. On the contrary, when the text data of the Internet information is displayed on the display screen, since the screen can be vertically scrolled but cannot be laterally scrolled, it would be hard to see the text data at a peripheral portion of the display screen.
It would be thought to laterally scroll the text data, when the Internet information is displayed on the display screen. However, since each sentence of the text data continues from one peripheral portion to another peripheral portion when a line is changed, when the text data is laterally scrolled to one side, the text data at another side will be disappeared. Hence, it would be much harder to recognize the Internet information. Therefore, the laterally scrolling the text data would be not an adequate countermeasure to overcome the above-described inconvenience.